¹ Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 108–09. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragodie, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Mon-tinari, Pt. in, Vol. i (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972), Ch. ii, pp. 27–28. All references to Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of Tragedy) are identified by chapter and page number from this volume. All English translations of Nietzsche, as well as of other German writers, are my own. Richard Schacht refers to the Babylonian orgies that repel Nietzsche as “pre-Dionysian savagery” (“Nietzsche on Art in The Birth of Tragedy,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani [New York: St. Martin's, 1977], p. 287), but this phrase begs the question; Nietzsche says “Dionysian barbarians.” Kaufmann's important point about the positive aspect of Socratism is developed in the argument below.

² Ernst Cassirer, Das mythische Denken, Vol. II of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), esp. Sec. 4, pp. 281–311.

³ See Jacques Derrida, “La Mythologie blanche,” Poétique, 5 (1971), 1–52, and other items in this number of Poétique; also Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971). And Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verstandnis seines Philosophierens, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1950), pp. 366–74. Jaspers assumes something like Cassirer's idea of myth; he assumes that myth is a phenomenon of the past, which must be resurrected and, once resurrected, believed in (esp. p. 367). My point is that Nietzsche uses the word “myth” to refer to something always present and always being created, in varying degrees of intensity. The issue is thus basically word usage, and my argument below parallels Jaspers' on “Die Unmitteilbarkeit der Wahrheit” (p. 224).

⁴ For the sake of compactness I neglect certain thinkers, like Schelling, who are very important in the general area of myth and aesthetics. See my tentative discussion in “Tis Sixty Years Since,” German Quarterly, 45 (1972), 684–702.

⁵ Pautrat, in an excellent discussion of one Nietz-schean “allegory,” shows that for Nietzsche allegory is not at all a shallow or trivial mode (pp. 20–28).

⁶ The words “aesthetic science” immediately awaken a number of associations in any mind familiar with earlier German philosophy: e.g., Kant's denial, in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, that beautiful science or a science of the beautiful is possible; and Hegel's idea of the science of art as superseding art itself. The phrase is thus meant to disturb and alert the reader.

⁷ It must be noted that the word “instinctiv” is an adverb, not an adjective; Nietzsche is talking, not about an “instinctive and unconscious” wisdom, but about an “instinctively unconscious” wisdom; i.e., we (or the Greeks) have an instinct that keeps this wisdom unconscious. I try to elucidate this idea below. See nn. 12, 18.

⁸ On a similar idea of teaching by analogy, see my “‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater’: The Ironic Basis of Goethe's Faust,” German Quarterly, 49 (1976), 438–55.

⁹ The classic statement of this idea is by pseudo-Longinus, who says that great poetry fills us with an extravagant pride, as if we were the creators of what we hear (Ch. vii, Sec. 2 [Paris MS., fol. 182^v]).

¹⁰ This idea becomes increasingly prominent in Schiller's aesthetics as it develops chronologically, e.g., in the third letter of Uber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (in Schillers Samtliche Werke, Sakular-Ausgabe [Stuttgart: Cotta, 1904], Vol. xii) and in the essays on the sublime and on the chorus in tragedy (Sakular-Ausgabe, Vols, xii, xvi). The general relation between Schiller and Nietzsche is discussed below. See also Schacht, pp. 281–82.

¹¹ Thomas Mann, unlike most Nietzsche critics, understood this point very well. See my “Casting Out Nines: Structure, Parody and Myth in Tonio Kroger,” Revue des Langues Vivantes, 42 (1976), 142–46.

¹² The Sophoclean passage is, in its standard but perhaps questionable translation: “The best thing is not to be born; but once born, by far the second best is to return as fast as possible whence one came” (Colonus, 11. 1225–28). This idea appears frequently in antiquity as the wisdom of Silenus, the best-known passage being Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium, 115B-E. Again, the presence of precisely these words in a tragedy makes one wonder exactly what Nietzsche means by the poets' “unconsciousness.” See n. 7 above.

¹³ In addition, Nietzsche mentions Schiller's thinking on lyric poetry (Ch. v, p. 39) and on the idyll (Ch. xix, p. 120); and the argument about how tragedy enabled the Greeks to maintain an attitude “between India and Rome” (Ch. xxi, p. 129), between actionless otherworldliness and crass this-worldliness, is exactly the type of political-aesthetic argument Schiller advances in Uber die ästhetische Erziehung. Also, on the crucial Schillerian idea of “Spiel,” compare Ch. xxiv, p. 148, and Ch. xxv, p. 150, as well as “Die dionysische Weltanschauung,” where the definitions of Apollonian and Dionysian turn on this idea (Werke, Pt. iii, Vol. ii, p. 46).

¹⁴ Mendelssohn, “Von der Herrschaft uber die Neigungen,” Sees. 11, 12, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai, Briefwechsel uber das Trauerspiel, ed. Schulte-Sasse (Munich: Winkler, 1972), p. 99. See also Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735; facs. rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954), Sees. 7, 9.

¹⁵ In the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing approaches this question by way of the Aristotelian question of a character's “goodness,” passes via a discussion of Richard III to Diderot's question of “general” and “specific” characters, and at the end of No. 95 leaves this last unanswered (Samtliche Schrijten, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, 3rd ed., 23 vols. [Stuttgart: Gôschen, 1886–1924], x, 187–88).

¹⁶ On Schiller's and Goethe's failures to achieve a complete understanding of Hellenic antiquity, see Ch. xx, p. 127; on the inapplicability of moral categories to tragedy, see Ch. xxii, pp. 138–39. Schiller claims, of course, that, far from subordinating art to morality, he shows that art cultivates an intermediate area between rational and sensual existence, thus enabling us to achieve wholeness of being; this wholeness, however, ultimately serves a moral freedom Nietzsche does not believe in. Nor, it appears, does Nietzsche believe in any mediation between the drives; the idea of “Spiel,” which in Uber die ästhetische Erziehung is the mediating force, is prominent in “Die dionysische Weltanschauung,” but it is almost entirely eliminated in the developed thought of The Birth of Tragedy.

¹⁷ Failure to grasp this point leads Paul de Man into a serious error in “Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy,” Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (1972), 44–53. Misled by the words “metaphysical consolation,” de Man equates tragic culture with “Dionysian” culture (p. 52), a misconception that makes it impossible to understand the reciprocity of the drives. Apollonian culture and “Dionysian culture” (a phrase Nietzsche does not use) are one and the same. The individual work of art can be either Apollonian or Dionysian to the exclusion of the other; but a whole culture is Apollonian precisely to the extent that it is Dionysian, and vice versa. If Apollonian Greece had not also been fundamentally Dionysian (see Ch. ii, p. 30), then Dionysian music would simply have been incomprehensibly alien to it and would never have gained entrance. Schacht also speaks of “tragic culture” as an object of “hope” for Nietzsche (p. 311); Schacht's essay, in general, is the perfect example of an otherwise admirable argument that neglects the historicity of Nietzsche's “artistic drives” and falls into the trap of regarding the physiological states of dream and intoxication as “more fundamental” than the developed achievements of conscious art (p. 282).

¹⁸ We can now understand the locution “instinctively unconscious” (see n. 7). The instinct that keeps the truth unconscious or ungrasped is an instinct to confront the truth as truth.

¹⁹ In The Birth of Tragedy itself, Nietzsche is cautious with the word “schaffen,” although he does use it to describe the origin of the Olympians (Ch. iii, p. 32). He had not yet been so cautious in “Die dionysische Weltanschauung,” where he says of the origin of ancient tragedy, “Der Ekel am Weiterleben wird als Mittel zum Schaffen empfunden” ‘The revulsion against continuing to live is felt as a means of creation’ (Werke, Pt. iii, Vol. ii, p. 62); nothing in The Birth of Tragedy itself comes quite this close to my own description of the union of Apollonian and Dionysian above.

²⁰ Again we are reminded of Schiller: “Wenn der Kunstler an einem Uhrwerk zu bessern hat, so läßt er die Räder ablaufen; aber das lebendige Uhrwerk des Staats muß gebessert werden, indem es schlägt” ‘When the craftsman has to fix a clockwork, he lets it run down; but the living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is ticking’ (Säkular-Ausgabe, xii, 9).